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NATO: The Potemkin Alliance

In one of his final speeches as secretary of Defense, Robert
Gates took NATO allies to the woodshed. Addressing the leaders of
the alliance at a meeting in Brussels late last week, Gates
criticized European spending priorities, which have led to
penny-pinching on military spending as governments shift financial
resources to domestic programs. If that did not change, he warned,
NATO’s future was “dim, if not dismal.”

Gates did not mince words. “The blunt reality is that there will
be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the
American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious
funds on behalf of nations that are unwilling to devote the
necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and
capable partners in their own defense.”

Those are understandable sentiments, since the defense budgets
of the European allies, which tended to be anemic even during the
Cold War, have been in virtual free fall in recent years. The
commitment that all NATO members made to devote at least two
percent of their gross domestic product to defense spending is now
little more than a quaint, irrelevant historical memory. Virtually
none of the European members, from “Old Europe” or New Europe, have
met that target.

Indeed, even before the current economic crisis led to drastic
budget slashing, spending levels in several countries (including
such major allies as Germany and Italy) were closer to one percent
of GDP than two. And matters have gotten much worse in the past two
years. The $700 billion U.S. defense budget now accounts for an
astonishing 74 percent of total spending by NATO members. The other
26 members of the alliance spend a mere $220 billion —
despite having a collective economy larger than that of the United
States.

Not only are budgets collapsing, but key weapons systems are
being eliminated right and left. With the partial exceptions of
Britain and France, the NATO militaries are both small and second
rate. And given the projected spending trends in Paris and London,
the British and French militaries will soon be joining their
ranks.

This problem has been building since the end of the Cold War. As
early as the First Persian Gulf conflict, U.S. military commanders
were skeptical whether most troop contributions from NATO members
added much military value. By the turn of the century, U.S. alarm
at the eroding military capabilities of the alliance was evident,
and U.S. officials were voicing warnings not unlike those Gates
expressed in Brussels.

But Washington’s threats to de-emphasize its commitment to NATO
are probably as hollow as the alliance’s military capabilities
themselves. The Europeans have heard this all before.
Burden-sharing controversies go back to the early 1950s, punctuated
by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s warning that the United
States might have to conduct “an agonizing reappraisal” of its
security commitment to Europe if the allies did not put forth a
more serious effort. The Europeans suspected that threat was a
bluff (which it was), and they probably suspect that the warning
from Gates is merely the latest in a long, dreary series of empty
threats.

But let’s hope that this time they’re wrong. Washington needs to
ask what the purpose is of having allies. This country should not
be simply a security partner collector — acquiring allies for
the sake of having allies. The NATO “partners” now seem to fit that
description. They bring less and less to the table in terms of
security assets, and some of them, because of their own disputes
with neighboring states, bring along the serious liability of
potentially entangling the United States in unnecessary
conflicts.

NATO has become a Potemkin alliance — an impressive
façade, but little substance. There is a big difference
between having capable security allies and having a collection of
weak security dependents. It is long past time for Washington to
conduct that “agonizing reappraisal.”